Irish Examiner view: Education is our best foil to extremism

After last week’s events in Washington, Hillary Clinton, who previously branded Trump supporters as 'deplorables', may feel vindicated.

One of the many reasons Hillary Clinton did not succeed Barack Obama as US president in 2016 was her use of the phrase “basket of deplorables” to describe half of Donald Trump’s supporters. “They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic,” she warned. The next day, she expressed regret for “saying half”.

Her prescience was a hostage to fortune. Clinton conceded, in her 2017 book What Happened, that the phrase was one of the rocks her ambitions crashed on and denied her the White House. The Trump campaign, then guided by Stephen Bannon, goaded Clinton with the phrase. Many Trump supporters adopted the ‘deplorable’ moniker as a gesture of defiance. Those who accused Clinton of arrogance, of elitism, and of being out of touch, were strident, revelling in the opportunity to goad the Ivy League-educated candidate, all the while turning a blind eye to their own champion’s unshakeable, in-the-marrow ignorance.

After last week’s events in Washington, Clinton may feel vindicated, though it would be wrong to judge the 70m-plus Americans who voted for Trump by the actions of those thousands who brought the fight to “weak politicians”. 

That polls show that almost half of Republicans supported the attack brings urgency to understanding how this momentum has such weight. That event already has had profound consequences. 

Many of Trump’s inner circle have, as they scented change and opprobrium, quit. Many of his supporters have followed and so the battle for the recovery of the Republican Party, the one that respected democracy and so much more, begins. One strand of that process must be an effort to understand why so many embraced beliefs that — and there is no cheering way to say this — are so unhinged that they defy rational analysis. For many of those in the vanguard at Washington, and at Trump’s rallies, it was as if anger had swamped any capacity to winnow fact from fantasy.

That anger was channelled and amplified through social media, which, as we report today, imposes a growing responsibility on Ireland, as we host ever more data banks, some of which facilitate peddling of the most noxious views. Once again, our Government, like governments everywhere, struggles to match technological innovation with appropriate legislation and oversight.

Those social media conversations highlighted another aspect of this collapse — and there is no cheering way to say this, either: All too many of those exchanges show what happens when educational opportunities are either derided or denied. Many of the Maga online contributions were profound indictments of the education system their authors used. 

Access to education, and its restoration, as a central ambition in the US’s culture was never more important. It is, of course, all too easy to be condescending while discussing extreme Trumpistas, but it is difficult not to see even a basic education as a foil to energies such as the QAnon lunacies.

That we also report soaring book sales today is reassuring, but we, and the US, must do much more to repel the ideas
unleashed by the worst president in US history. And our best weapon is education and then more education.